Wireless communications systems are used in a variety of telecommunications systems, television, radio and other media systems, data communication networks, and other systems to convey information between remote points using wireless transmitters and wireless receivers. A transmitter is an electronic device which, usually with the aid of an antenna, propagates an electromagnetic signal such as radio, television, or other telecommunications. Transmitters often include signal amplifiers which receive a radio-frequency or other signal, amplify the signal by a predetermined gain, and communicate the amplified signal. On the other hand, a receiver is an electronic device which, also usually with the aid of an antenna, receives and processes a wireless electromagnetic signal. In certain instances, a transmitter and receiver may be combined into a single device called a transceiver.
3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data. Under the LTE standard, control data may be communicated from a wireless base station to a wireless communication device via a Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH). A PDCCH is transmitted on one or an aggregation of several consecutive control channel elements (CCEs) during a control channel slot of a wireless communication sub-frame.
Recent research has indicated that wireless communication devices near the edge of a cell serviced by a base station may experience degradation in performance. Many solutions have been provided to solve problems related cell-edge degradation of traffic channel communication, but many of such solutions may not be effective to solve cell-edge degradation problems associated with control channels such as PDCCH, as traffic channels often exist in the form of resource blocks while a control channel may use CCEs spread across an entire available frequency bandwidth.